The astronomers announced the most distant and oldest super massive black hole which was not seen even has now been discovered. It was published in a study on Wednesday.
The black hole is there in a quasar and its light reaches us from when the universe was only 5% of its present age over 13 billion years ago, or “just” 690 million years after the Big Bang.
Quasars are actually the brightest and most-distant known celestial objects which are crucial to understanding the early universe, said study co-author Bran Venemans of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany.
The discovery of a massive black hole so early in the universe may give important hints on conditions at that time, which actually lead the huge black holes to form.
It’s a truly gargantuan black hole, which is some 800 million times the mass of our sun. The size astonished and put astronomers in dilemma.
“This black hole grew far larger than we expected in only 690 million years after the Big Bang, which challenges our theories about how black holes form,” said study co-author Daniel Stern of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Study lead author Eduardo of the Carnegie Institution for Science explained that “gathering all this mass in fewer than 690 million years is an enormous challenge for theories of supermassive black hole growth.”
This is very unlikely the black holes that form in the present-day universe, which rarely exceed a few dozen solar masses.
Robert Simcoe who is a study author of MIT, said “this is the only object we have observed from this era. It has an extremely high mass, and yet the universe is so young that this thing shouldn’t exist. The universe was just not old enough to make a black hole that big. It’s very puzzling.”
The unexpected discovery relied on data collected from observatories around the world. It’s part of a long-term search for the earliest quasars, which will still proclaim. Even older examples could be discovered, scientists said.
The discovery was found by scouring the new generation of wide-area, sensitive surveys astronomers are doing using NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer in orbit and ground-based telescopes in Chile and Hawaii, Stern said.
“This is a very exciting discovery,” he said. “With several next-generation, even-more-sensitive facilities currently being built, we can expect many exciting discoveries in the very early universe in the coming years.”
